People with disabilities and older people are often marginalised and still left behind in humanitarian situations. They have limited opportunity and resources to influence the planning and delivery of humanitarian programming that impacts their lives. The situation is compounded by misconceptions and stigma against people with disabilities remain perceived as ‘objects of charity’, ‘a burden’ and ‘incapable’ by the general public and these views have challenged the OPDs in their works to advocate for disability rights. Consequently, the efforts to localise humanitarian actions, especially in Indonesia, have not included Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) and/or Older People Associations (OPAs) as contributors and leaders in humanitarian programming.
Regarding that gap, Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund (ASB) Indonesia and the Philippines are trying to create a meaningful partnership between people with disabilities, older people, and humanitarian organisations through PIONEER Project which was held in February 2021–October 2022 in Sigi, Central Sulawesi, and Magelang, Central Java. Partner for Inclusion: Localising Inclusive Humanitarian Response in Indonesia (PIONEER) was intended to reduce the marginalisation of OPDs and OPAs in humanitarian actions. It sought to remove various barriers that prevent people with disabilities and older people from playing leadership roles in localised humanitarian responses, including attitudinal barriers (such as stigma against people with disabilities) and institutional barriers (such as humanitarian programming policies and practices that systematically exclude people with disabilities in humanitarian initiatives).
The PIONEER project fills that gap by ensuring that all of the target group may be empowered and become more cooperative and productive. To accomplish such goals, PIONEER has five important key actions. Establishing PIONEER management partnerships and equipping the partners to equally co-implement the project comes first. Practically, PIONEER project carried out major tasks in this section, like consolidating PIONEER project design, shared commitment and division of labour through joint-partner consolidation, and strengthening and transferring capacity between partners on modules. The project’s next major step will be to operationalise, test, and improve the PIONEER mechanism. As a result of the lesson learnt, it is crucial to establish strong connections and relationships as a component of implementation.
Operationalising a consolidated framework for ethics, monitoring, mentorship, and assistance is the third key action. Additionally, PIONEER also has established and implemented the tools/enablers for ethical partnerships between all partners involved, such as the partnership code of ethics, feedback mechanisms and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) framework. Fourth, assessing the effectiveness and impact of PIONEER mechanism. Based on PIONEER experience, it was crucial to develop tools that identified the situations at the initial stage of the project (baseline) in comparison with the final stage of the project (end-line), allowing everyone to easily observe how things changed between those two stages. Finally, PIONEER has taken steps to capture and extensively disseminate the project learnings to ensure that many more people and target groups understand the goal of this initiative.
Along with describing the main action, every reader must understand the impact of those phases too. Based on the findings of the effectiveness and impact assessment of the practice, it is shown that the PIONEER mechanism has contributed to enabling meaningful participation and leadership of local OPDs and OPAs in the planning, implementation and monitoring of local humanitarian response projects. At the same time, they also showed increased capacities, both knowledge and practical skills, in these thematic areas: disability and older people inclusion, inclusive disaster preparedness and humanitarian response, localisation of aid, project cycle management, and data in humanitarian response.
PIONEER also achieved an unintended positive result in Magelang district. At the initial stage of the project, the existing diverse OPDs in Magelang were operating individually. They did not have a formal network or working group to consolidate their agenda for disability inclusion, unlike in Sigi, Central Sulawesi. With the help of this project, they have been able to advance their disability inclusion activism: they have advocated and influenced local policy-making, which is a village regulation on disability inclusion.
OPDs and OPAs also consider themselves to be active contributors to the local humanitarian response after joining the PIONEER Project. They reported feeling more capable and confident to contribute. Their awareness of humanitarian response also is increasing. They believe that OPDs and OPAs are not only the beneficiaries but there must be active involvement as actors in an inclusive humanitarian response. Other organisations will probably take PIONEER’s approach to carrying out this practice with target groups as a lesson when putting interventions for older adults and people with disabilities into place. It is necessary to keep them in control of their own lives in order to maintain the globe inclusive. At this point, it is necessary to motivate them to be able to engage.
